Oral History Project Races to Record Voices of Partition Survivors in India and Pakistan

Muslim women boarding a train at New Delhi in India to travel to the newly independent Pakistan, Aug. 7, 1947.

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Like many Indians and Pakistanis his age, 75-year-old Ravi Chopra remembers the shocking violence triggered by the countries’ moves toward independence.

“Nobody imagined that such a holocaust would take place,” Mr. Chopra, a retired Indian army officer, said in an interview with a U.S.-based oral history project dedicated to recording tales of partition, as the division of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947 is known.

Where Mr. Chopra grew up in what is now part of Pakistani Punjab, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs generally got along, he said. “You have played with them, you have lived with them, you have eaten together,” he said. But as independence loomed, “The same people are coming and burning your houses and looting.”

As India and Pakistan prepare to celebrate their independence days this week, both countries will also be remembering the killings and ethnic cleansing that accompanied the end of British rule 67 years ago. Estimates vary, but some scholars calculate that as many as a million people may have died and around 15 million were displaced.

Guneeta Singh Bhalla, the Indian-American founder of The 1947 Partition Archive, says she is determined to collect and preserve the stories of those who lived through this tumultuous time, to make sure this great human tragedy isn’t forgotten.

“In four or five years we are going to completely lose people who were in their teens during the partition, that’s why the urgency” Ms. Bhalla, a physicist who lives in Berkeley, Calif., said. “The world does not know and the world will never know unless you tell them."

Ms. Bhalla says she was inspired to start the project by the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima, Japan, which collected testimonies of the survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on the city during World War II.

With the number of people that remember those violent times dwindling year by year, the organization has opened a new office in Delhi and plans to open one in Pakistan later this year and Bangladesh next year, Ms. Bhalla said.

The not-for-profit organization, wants to collect 10,000 stories and make them easily accessible to scholars and others. Though it started collecting stories back in 2011, it has only recorded 1,100 stories so far. Only about 150 of those have been posted on its website www.1947partitionarchive.org.

“We don't presently have the resources to make our massive collection available,” said Ms. Bhalla. “We need to do a lot of fund raising around this and presently are focused on story collection with our limited resources.”

The project, headed by a group of volunteers in Berkeley, hopes to collect the 10,000 stories by 2017 and have the money by then to put more of them online. It has trained hundreds of students and others who have collected stories in nine countries.

The survivor interviews are evenly split between Muslims and non-Muslims. The interview videos already up are haunting and strikingly similar no matter which direction the interviewee escaped to.

Most talk about how relations between Hindus and Muslims in their neighborhoods seemed to switch from friendly to deadly overnight. Those that migrated to India and those then went to Pakistan each witnessed horrific scenes of villages on fire and trains full of bodies.

Shane Ali, 73, was orphaned by the partition and had to move from the Ludhiana region of Punjab in India to Lahore in Pakistan.

He was only a boy when the violence started and most of the Muslims in his village were slaughtered. His neighborhood was surrounded by a group of men with weapons. After most of the Muslim men were murdered, the women and children were ordered to come out of hiding.

“They told us to sit under a big tree and then they started killing,” he said in the interview video recorded in Fremont, California. “The gunman was only 10 feet away. He shot at me ten times and every time he missed so I started running.”

He was saved by one of the men that had been killing his neighbors he said, and eventually brought to the Pakistan side of Punjab.

“I forgive even the people who killed my family,” said Mr. Ali.

Mr. Chopra and his family were travelling in the opposite direction.They moved from Sialkot in what is now Pakistan to Firozpur in India.

On a train headed towards the Indian side, his family hid in a cabin with a Muslim family. When the mobs came looking for Hindus, the family told them there were none left.

“Every station there was killing …in the other compartments (no Hindu) survived in the whole train,” he said. “Partition was a curse on human history. Such kind of hatred should never come into anybody’s life.”

Corrections and Amplifications:This post was corrected to reflect that the interviews on the site are evenly split between Muslim and non-Muslim survivors. An earlier version of the post said that Hindu and Sikh testimonies made up of the majority of the accounts.